AGEOD Forums

As a very green newbie to the game, I was wondering if spreading your units out across a map zone, just so you can visually see all the army, corps, divisions, brigades etc as individual counters has any effect on their performance in battle? Or whether they act as the single stack that the game defaults them to.

At the moment, I'm learning big time, and I prefer to visually see what I have, rather than have to investigate a stack of units to find whats there.. so I spread them out manually (I have no idea if there is a way to automatically keep units apart visually - but the game seems to autocluster them into stacks).

That can have a lethal effect as an enemy force can defeat you in detail, especially if the enemy force is say a 3-division Corps and heavily outnumbers your individual stacks: each division stack in turn could then get hit very hard. The game performs combat stack by stack and a divided force will not combine for combat resolution. Faced with a full enemy Corps, individual division stacks are quite likely to try to retreat from combat, so they won't be good at holding ground.

Also in combat a Corps stack will often commit more than one division during the fighting, plus Corps assets, which greatly increases fighting power and makes the stack more likely to withstand the combat successfully: this won't happen with individual division stacks.

In the early campaign game turns nobody can form Corps proper until Early March 1862. Once this becomes possible, Corps belonging to the same Army and in adjacent regions can "march to the sound of the guns", ie march to each others' aid in a fight - this can be a very powerful defensive or offensive effect, individual division stacks can't do this.

Hi
On the options menu you can select how the game show the units on map: spreading stacks across the zone or putting one on top of another at the start of each turn so only one is shown at a time (i prefer the later as things looks more tidy, but YMMV).
But don't confuse this purely visual deployment with the one that matters: the stacks/tabs you have over the unit display.
Each one of this tabs is a separate group of forces (no matter what display preference you select on the options menu) and the game will never auto merge them together. They will only show one over the other on map.
These "real stacks" is what Chertio mentions.
And as he explain, different stacks on a region can be engaged individually by the enemy so its usually good to have as few as you can so they fight together, as long as the stacks don't get high % penalties for lack of command points.

Regards!

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Ah yes, I'm trying to describe a purely aesthetic method of making your "stacks" display in a single map region. So, sort of showing visually the equivalent of the tabs in the unit display box at the bottom. NOT splitting my troops into individual brigades.

I'm struggling a bit to take in all the information at the moment, only taking baby steps through the Shiloh scenario, and I feel better about my understanding of the situation if I can see all my main troop "stacks". Even though having them all auto-arrange on top of each other is neater.

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making your "stacks" display in a single map region

Sorry, misunderstood - by unsetting the Media option Gray Lensman and Arsan mention, you can move your stacks by hand to different parts of a region and the "thumbnails" will remain displayed that way as here with four stacks in Culpeper.

With the option set, the display is combined into a single "thumbnail" at the end of every turn, though the forces are not actually merged.

Either way has no effect on combat.

There is no option to automatically display the "thumbnails" separately, has to be done by hand.

Thank you to all folks who answered my rather garbled question, your explanations have cleared the matter up for me.

Back to the manual for some more "light" reading methinks..

I'm determined to crack open the game's complexities and dive into all the detail and come out of it much more prepared for these higher level strategic games.. most of my wargaming has always been at the tactical/combat level, so this is sort of new ground for me.. and I have to be honest, I am quite overwhelmed by all the factors that are in play, never mind understanding the mechanisms behind just making your moves and plays. Not having that much of a grounding in the history of the period (other than the Gettysburg film, a couple of books and the Take Command: 2nd Manassas game - although years ago I did play Robert E Lee: Civil War General) and not really knowing that much of the geography concerned it is really a journey through the military history of the time, as well as exploring the modelling of this game and its ability to simulate that time.

No doubt I'll be back with more questions at some point...

Chertio wrote:[ATTACH]7532[/ATTACH]
With the option set, the display is combined into a single "thumbnail" at the end of every turn, though the forces are not actually merged.

Does anyone else find that the combining happens prior to the end of the turn as well? I find, for example, that when I try to separate my stacks in a region so that I can target one of them to be joined by another unit moving from elsewhere, the stacks snap back and combine as soon as I select the unit that I'd like to join one of the stacks. And of course, the stack on top is never the one I want the unit to join.

Reverend Zombie wrote:Does anyone else find that the combining happens prior to the end of the turn as well? I find, for example, that when I try to separate my stacks in a region so that I can target one of them to be joined by another unit moving from elsewhere, the stacks snap back and combine as soon as I select the unit that I'd like to join one of the stacks. And of course, the stack on top is never the one I want the unit to join.

Yes, it seems each region hs several "prefered points" for stacks positioning. Sometimes you drag it to your favorite corner and but slips back to one of that points.
For reorganizing troops between stacks on the same region i find much more convenient dragging the units to the different tabs over the unit display, not the actual stack on map.
Regards

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